It was only a matter of time before social media tools would work their way into becoming a contributing part of the sales process for organizations.

Over the past few months, our developers at CampaignerCRM have been hard at work analyzing how salespeople and customers use social media and how it can help the effectiveness of the overall sales process. We’ve recently added some brand new social media functions to our software to reflect these emerging patterns.

It would be selfish (and unsocial!) to keep this research to ourselves and not share how you can benefit from this fast-growing and ever-changing new business resource. So here are four specific ways your organization can leverage the latest social media tools and improve your bottom line.

1. Prospecting

It may be true that picking up and dialing a phone is still the best way to get in front of prospects, but that doesn’t mean social media doesn’t have it’s uses. What does your organization sell? I can guarantee you there is a LinkedIn group or Facebook page out there somewhere devoted to the subject. These groups are likely to include some people who are looking for what you’re trying to sell.

Why not reach out to them and offer your support and expertise? Establishing yourself as a useful resource is a strong step in the right direction. You can also use Twitter’s search function to search for keywords associated with pains some people have that might bring them to the solution you’re selling.

2.Pre-call research

Social media tools make pre-call research easy, and your prospects know this. They are likely to consider an unprepared sales call as an ill-informed, out of touch sales rep, and they aren't going to want to buy from them!

Check out LinkedIn before you pick up that phone to make sure you have the right person you are trying to reach. You might even discover that you have mutual acquaintances, which can be a huge help to gaining a prospect's trust. Also consider signing up for Google Alerts to stay in touch with the latest news on what's happening with their organization. The more prepared and well-informed you are, the easier it's going to be to gain that prospect's trust in you, which should ultimately lead to more closed deals.

3.Following-up

Having trouble contacting a prospect by phone or email? It’s very likely that they are bombarded on a daily basis with telephone calls and emails, many of which are probably from your competitors. Why not try going where the competition isn’t and message them on LinkedIn or Facebook?

Since you don’t want to just follow up for the sake of just “checking in”, use features within the social network to hand off a helpful resource or share something that makes the contact memorable. It works!

4.Maintaining long lasting relationships with customers

Building relationships with customers has always been critical, and the most successful salespeople do what they can to maintain long lasting relationships with their customers. If you developed a strong relationship with a customer, what better way to keep in touch with them by adding them to your LinkedIn network, following them on Twitter or even adding them as a friend on Facebook? This greatly increases your chances of discovering new opportunities with that customer via upsells, referrals or new selling opportunities if they take on a position within a different organization.

Put it all together and social media can give you a significantly wider perspective on your customer in addition to helping you find new opportunities. Take a good look at how they affect each aspect of your sales process – from prospecting to post-sale. And as these tools continue to evolve, keep your eye open for many more ways you can incorporate them into your sales process to give you an edge.

How do you motivate your workforce? What systems do you have in place to assure that your team can work through complex problems and find the best solution for your organization?

If you answered with "money" or any variation of that answer (bonuses, incentives, etc.) you probably aren't alone. Conventional economic and business wisdom for years has stated that if you want workers to work hard through complex problems, dangling some cash in front of them was the best way to get to the best solution.

"As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected," Pink explains. "The higher the pay the better performance. But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance."

It's important to note that Dan Pink isn't suggesting that money is useless as a motivator, just that employees should be paid enough to take the issue of money off the table. This makes sense. I'm sure most of us have at some point in time experienced stress in our lives related to money that has interfered with our workday. You may be experiencing it even now. Paying employees enough to take away this concern is essential, especially in a down economy.

But beyond that, Pink says that research has found that money and monetary incentives are in fact quite a lousy motivator.

I would suspect (and hope) that most of you reading this have a job that requires rudimentary cognitive skill. So what can we take away from this research?

Motivation is a key factor in succeeding in business, regardless of your industry. As an Editor of EyesOnSales.com, I have come across hundreds of articles that stress the importance of motivation. But most of this advice never goes beyond the personal level, or what a sales rep or manager can do to ensure that they'll keep their focus and work hard. I don't recall a lot of advice focusing on creating a motivational work environment that harnesses the right energies to bring the best ideas out of their workforce.

Pink describes three areas essential to motivating a workforce: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy means the desire to feel self-directed and feel a certain ownership over the work they perform. Sounds simple enough, but when the going gets tough at organizations many times you’ll see a management “clampdown” that leaves workers feeling anything but autonomous. Facing the pressure of declining revenues, managers might unknowingly double-down on their employees and act as more of a "big brother" type force that discourages independence and autonomy.

Mastery is the basic human drive to want to excel at certain things. We'd all like to get better at something. Growth is equally essential in any position. Companies certainly have a role to ensure the personal growth and expertise of their employees. As individuals, we too need to remember to take the time to hone in and improve our skills. The limitless resources of the internet makes this a much easier task than it was even 5 years ago, and it takes personal responsibility to reserve time towards self-improvement. Falling into routine is a sure-fire way to guarantee mediocre accomplishments.

The final aspect of ensuring a motivated workforce is perhaps the trickiest to create, a strong purpose. What's the purpose of your organization? What's the purpose of your role within your organization? If you have to take a moment to think about your answer, it's probably not a strong enough purpose to guarantee your own motivation. The most successful people in this world have a sense of purpose that runs bone deep. Similar to how it's near impossible to sell something you don't honestly believe in, it's even more difficult to sell yourself on working hard on something you don't feel has any purpose.

This morning and this afternoon my entire organization is getting together for a low-key brainstorming session to harvest the great ideas as we move forward into Q4. It's a terrific opportunity not only to find new solutions to existing business issues we face, but also ensure that everyone will come out with a stronger sense of purpose that will last into the months ahead. I consider myself fortunate to work for an organization that understands how crucial a strong sense of purpose is for success.

When looking for solutions to complex problems, we're often told as employees to "think outside the box." Maybe it's time that organizations start "thinking outside the box" on how to motivate their workforce to best work through those complex problems. Similar to how Henry Ford's Model T assembly line revolutionized how we saw business in the 20th century, the new ways we discover to motivate employees will likely revolutionize the next century.

It is key to finding those creative and groundbreaking ideas that put you ahead of your competition. And I believe we are just seeing the beginning of companies that are tapping into this energy.

If you are like most companies with good marketing strategies, you focus on getting the right ROI, lead targets, and marketing demographics into your campaigns. You often start life casting a wide net – or a net determined by some basic industry standard. From there, you run tests, A – this… B – that. You build complicated SEO strategies that put the language on your sites into complicated architectures by which you say "these terms are gospel" to your copy strategies. You make changes to your homepages, high-level messaging, try to sub-segment the hell out of your existing leads when you remarket to them to hope you have pinpointed the sweet spot of pain. After every cycle, you go through a process of boosting what works, cutting what doesn’t and filling in new collateral, technology or designs to help bolster your next campaign.

If you are doing this, this is great and very important, but have you taken a look at where you are NOW from where you were when you dropped your first campaign?

Has your product/service changed or added anything new?

Has the market changed? Price points, demand or expectations?

Have the "industry accepted terminologies" changed? What was “hosted” yesterday, is “cloud” today.

Has management staffing or vision changed?

Is your audience now ready to absorb/share your message via social media?

Has feedback the sales team has put in your CRM solution changed?

Has the look and feel of your campaigns kept up with the times?

Has the collection of new collateral, technology, or offerings you’ve created over time something you can now package and offer to a group you previously trimmed out?

Has the last piece of collateral you have put out evolved so far, it makes your first piece look like a misfit?

An engineer friend of mine from days past said "I look back on a piece of code I wrote six months ago and I asked myself, ‘What the hell was I thinking writing that!?’" As professionals, we take every day to grow and improve our skills and profession. His perspective is not that much different for us in Sales and Marketing.

Now, take a look at your campaigns with a fresh set of eyes. Look at your current campaigns as if you were dropping, today, for the first time given the questions above. Do you find that you are currently in an OVER optimized state? Have you "mentally blocked out" options from a decision made 6-12-18 months ago, but no longer applies now? Do you see opportunities being left on the table because you have progressively filtered them out over time – not taking into consideration the some of the factors above.

I’m not suggesting you unplug every thing you’ve ever worked to optimize and start over again. This would risk your budget and your ROI. But selectively looking at every "optimization switch" you flipped over the past string of campaigns may enlighten you to some new opportunities you have previously filtered out. We all get locked into the day-to-day and sometimes get too close. "Etch-a-sketching your brain" from time to time may give you that fresh look at your work and "shake free" a few more opportunities from each of your campaigns that you would have previously excluded.

For a while now, you have probably been seeing news stories about the importance of Social CRM. CRM, (Customer Relationship Management), has become well understood by many in the business world. Certainly even more people know what Social Media is, but what exactly is Social CRM? Having worked at both a Social Media company, Mzinga, and a CRM company, CampaignerCRM, I think I have a pretty good perspective on the promises of the Social CRM buzz.

At its foundation, Social CRM is the integration of CRM applications, marketing, sales and support, with the tools, properties and content found in social media sites. But which tools, properties and content are right for your business?

I recently looked behind one of the share buttons you see on nearly every large website these days. That button allowed me to share an article on over 300 social media sites! Does that mean I need my CRM system to be able to connect to each and every one of these sites? Fortunately for your vendor and for you, the answer is no. What you need is a CRM system that will connect with the social media sites that are going to help you find, sell and maintain your customers.

Let me use an example that illustrates a real world use case for Social CRM. Let’s say you sell widgets to Tom at the ABC company every several months. You have worked hard to cultivate a relationship with Tom and he is an important customer to you. One day, Tom decides to leave the ABC company because there is more opportunity at the XYZ company. If Tom is active in LinkedIn, he probably updated his profile to reflect his new job and title. He may have even tweeted about this change. The fact that Tom left the ABC company is important to you. First, Tom may want to buy widgets from you for the XYZ company. Second, you need to start building your relationship with Tom’s replacement at the ABC company so that you can continue to sell them widgets. A Social CRM, a CRM system that is integrated with LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, will help you gain access to this information.

This is just one example and other social media properties have good use cases as well. Facebook is promoting Fan pages that companies are currently using as mini websites for their company. It’s important for you to understand where in the social media world people are discussing, commenting or complaining about your company, product or service. These are the sites that are important to your business and it is here that you will be able to leverage the power of social media with your CRM.

The announcement that the man who brought us the incredibly innovative Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone, and iPad would no longer be at the helm at Apple has caused a near collective groan across the universe. There was a disturbance in the Force.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that he would no longer be Apple's CEO due to health reasons. By now you've no doubt seen or read the news stories filled with (justifiable) superlatives being bestowed upon Jobs: Innovative. Brilliant. Creative. Charismatic. And many, many more. They also mention his other side. Vitriolic. Taskmaster. Controlling. But there's one key superlative that stands out: Visionary.

Why is that one word so important to the success of Apple?

Whether you run a company or a division, or even a department, a leader has to have a clear idea of where they want their people to be marching. In the early days of the highly competitive computer industry, Apple wasn't taken seriously by its competitors. However, Jobs was able to chart a vision for the organization. One that gave it an identity and a purpose: Be Different. It was simple and clear, but it spoke volumes to the organization, giving them the confidence to explore and to create some of the most innovative and revolutionary technologies of our time.

Today, Apple's competitors not only take Apple seriously, they're straining to catch up as Apple speeds by them. With Job's leadership, Apple has grown to become one of the most exciting, interesting, and, of course, profitable companies in the world, supported by a near-religious following of customers.

That's what vision does for leadership; it gives the team direction, and helps them to focus on understanding what it really takes to get the job done. It inspires. It creates. Like the player on a team who makes others around him better, vision helps make everyone see the same picture - clearly.

If you're a manager, a department head, and especially if you're a CEO, take a moment to reflect on what your organization's vision is. Is it clear? Is it understandable? Does it inspire?

The biggest lesson that today's business can learn from Steve Jobs is not just that he was innovative and driven. His brilliance was in how he used his vision to inspire other people to be innovative and driven. And in the end, when everyone shares it, good things happen.